How to Install Apache Benchmark on CentOS (bash: ab command not found)

Because I’m keep forgetting this and probably many of you might also need this info, I decided to post it on my blog. Lately I was doing some benchmark tests on different servers. On one of the servers (running on CENTOS 6.8) I was using the Apache Benchmarking tool and was getting this error:

bash: ab command not found

After doing some investigation and online research I found out httpd was missing so I tried to install it. The installation failed. From further investigation I found out that I have to editing the yum.conf file.

I’m a web developer, but don’t have much experience with configuring servers, so it took me a while to figure everything out. Anyways, I will show you step by step what you should do in order to install AB benchmark on your CENTOS 6.8 server:

Connect via SSH to the server using Putty.

Run the following command to configure yum.conf

vi /etc/yum.conf

The Result

exclude=bind-chroot courier* dovecot* exim* filesystem httpd* mod_ssl* mydns* mysql* nsd* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* spamassassin* squirrelmail*

Now you have to remove http* from the exclude list.

Type the following command to save and exit:

:wq

Now install httpd using the following command line:

yum -y install httpd

This will take few seconds and will get a notification whether the installation was successful or not. After installing httpd you need to run the following command for benchmarking:

ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://google.com/

The result:

Benchmarking google.com (be patient).....done Server Software: gws Server Hostname: google.com Server Port: 80 Document Path: / Document Length: 219 bytes Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 0.030 seconds Complete requests: 10 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Non-2xx responses: 10 Total transferred: 5400 bytes HTML transferred: 2190 bytes Requests per second: 332.06 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 30.115 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 3.011 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 175.11 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 1 1 0.3 1 1 Processing: 13 14 0.4 14 14 Waiting: 13 14 0.5 14 14 Total: 13 15 0.6 15 16 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 15 66% 15 75% 15 80% 15 90% 16 95% 16 98% 16 99% 16

100% 16 (longest request)

Done!

Hope this has helped you and next time if I forget how to install the AB (Apache Benchmark) on a web server, this tutorial will help me remember.